NT Future: Curtain up on the new National Theatre

The South Bank's brutalist beauty has undergone a complete revamp and besides the bright and airy new spaces, walkways, bars and cafés, the highlight, says Nick Curtis, is the lovely new Dorfman Theatre

So this is what £80 million looks like. Over the coming days, weeks and months Londoners will finally get to see the effects on the National Theatre of a refurbishment, NT Future, which was three years in the planning, has been under way for another three, and should be completed next year for the aforementioned sum (£3 million is still to be raised if you have any spare cash). It is the work of architects HaworthTompkins, acknowledged master at sensitively reshaping playhouses and making them inviting even to non-theatre-goers.

Artistic director Nicholas Hytner, who will hand the — hopefully completed — building over to his successor Rufus Norris next year, says: “NT Future is all about opening the National Theatre up to more people, whether they are coming to do a course in our new Learning Centre, watching our theatre-makers at work backstage, or simply having a drink in our new café.”

It should enhance the theatregoing experience for its core audience and bring the building up to speed with the rest of the South Bank, where café culture now rubs shoulders with high art.

Prime among the changes are a new bar and bookshop opening this week; a new entrance and restaurant, due to be unveiled at the end of the month; workshop spaces vastly enhanced by a new block to the south, and dedicated rooms for the educational department.

Some of the upgrades are hidden — a new power plant, ground-water pump and better insulation. But arguably the biggest change is to the flexible Cottesloe theatre, rebuilt and renamed the Dorfman — in honour of the Travelex chairman who donated £10 million in cornerstone funding to the refurbishment campaign — which reopens officially next Monday with the press night of David Byrne’s disco musical about Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love.

A few days ago the NT’s Lisa Burger, newly promoted from chief operating officer to executive director, and project manager Paul Jozefowski gave me a tour of the parts of Denys Lasdun’s 1976 brutalist concrete masterpiece that were still swathed in barriers as workmen carried out finishing touches.

The Grade II-listed building still starkly divides people, and even though Burger and Jozefowski love it, as I do, as a radical piece of architecture as well as a creative powerhouse, they acknowledge it has problems that the refurbishment is designed to rectify, or at least alleviate.

The concrete structure has weathered better than buildings of similar construction and vintage, and the building remains sound. But, as Burger says: “We’ve been open since 1976 and, at least recently, playing to 90 per cent capacity. Some things have just worn out.”

In 1976 London was still in thrall to the car. “A road ran right around the building,” says Jozefowski, who has worked at the National since 1982. “Early reports praised the entrance as a porte-cochère [carriage port] where you could drop off your wife before parking.” The building faced Waterloo Bridge, to the west, as everything further east was derelict or industrial; and it “turned its back” on the local community to the south. A refurbishment in 1998 placed a bookshop to the left of the National’s entrance, a virtual eyepatch blinding it to all that was opening up further east: Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge.

So the new glazed entrance is “a larger version of Lasdun’s original”, and the bookshop has been moved to the back of the foyer into a larger, attractively scarlet-painted space formerly occupied by the cloakroom and an engineering bay. “We had to take advice on what we could cut into,” says Jozefowski, “because that wall [at the back] supports the Olivier Theatre.”

The distinctive poured-concrete walls have been repaired, inside and out, by a specialist firm and by two apprentices trained in the art with Heritage Lottery funding. The tropical hardwood Lasdun used is now restricted, so any new carpentry has been done in oak, or the plywood from which the theatre’s sets are built, stained dark.

To the right of the foyer, the Lyttelton theatre’s bar will soon be moved to where its Seventies-style café currently stands. To the left of the foyer will be a new café called Kitchen. Beside that is Understudy, a jaunty, airy new bar with furniture made from props and equipment (the old wheels from the Olivier Theatre’s drum revolve act as table bases) and a big copper tun from Meantime brewery.

Sneak peek: the National Theatre's makeover

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Work in progress: Artistic director Nicholas Hytner, will hand the — hopefully completed — building over to his successor Rufus Norris next yearPic: Philip Vile

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Social spaces: Nicholas Hytner says “NT Future is all about opening the National Theatre up to more people, whether they are coming to do a course in our new Learning Centre, watching our theatre-makers at work backstage, or simply having a drink in our new café."Pic: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

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Eat, drink: The café and bar sit under the huge concrete “raking struts” that support the National’s eastern terraces — a dazzling architectural feature long obscured because the bins and refrigeration units used to be there Pic: Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures

“Kitchen will have twice as big a menu and twice the sophistication of the old café, but it will take you no longer to get served,” promises Patrick Harrison, the National’s director of commercial operations. It will also sell honey made in the hives on the building’s roof.

The café and bar sit under the huge concrete “raking struts” that support the National’s eastern terraces — a dazzling architectural feature long obscured because the bins and refrigeration units used to be there. Kitchen will be linked to the Olivier theatre’s restaurant — remodelled, renamed House, and already open — by a new triple-height atrium, gained by pushing a glazed wall out into what was outdoor space.

There will also be a new disabled lift. “Although the place was supposed to be very open and democratic it was hopeless for people with mobility issues,” says Burger. The various different levels, slopes and steps around the building — a hangover of the old road — have been finessed to give flat access and to enable the creation of piazzas that link the building to its surroundings and its neighbours.

All of these changes had to be approved by Lambeth council, the 20th Century Society and English Heritage. Lambeth opposed the idea of a walkway between the National and the Grade I-listed Waterloo Bridge, and of new windows punched into the original structure (“They didn’t want us to destroy the fortress-like quality of the building,” says Jozefowski). But the council did donate land to the south, where the Max Rayne Centre now nestles against Lasdun’s blank back wall. It’s built of similar brick to that which Lasdun used in the National’s non-concrete parts, with metallic detailing. It houses a glass garret studio where freelance designers (not accommodated in the original building) can work and hang out, and the painting studio. Huge windows to the east will enable passers-by to take a look in.

Set-builders, metalworkers and prop- makers will expand into the vast dramatic spaces freed up by the old painting studio. And visitors to the new Dorfman can look down on this hive of activity from a new high-level walkway (so no more booking for backstage tours, folks). Lovely, flexible rehearsal-cum-classrooms have been built between the workshops and the Dorfman. Which brings us to the new theatre itself.

The Cottesloe was beloved of audiences and theatre-makers alike but its public spaces were a cramped disgrace. Now the glazed front wall of the foyer has been pushed out into another semi-piazza (although a road still runs through this one to the underground car park).

The stairwell has been moved to make more space, a bigger and more welcoming bar has been built, and the foyer balcony extended. The décor, a mix of scarlet, dark-stained ply and chainmail (hiding ventilation systems) is ravishing.

The changes inside the auditorium will be less noticeable, except that the chairs will be infinitely more comfortable and, thanks to subtle tweaking of the space, there will be an average of 100 more of them for each performance.

Has it all worked? We’ll only know once the tarpaulins are off and the new spaces are full of people. Inevitably some will bemoan the modification of a temple to culture — Lasdun envisaged a theatre as “a cave you looked out from” — into yet another multipurpose food-drink-art outlet. But the National undeniably needed to up its offer of material as well as intellectual sustenance. Although I don’t like the contrived name, Understudy looks good and the spaces for Kitchen are impressive.

For theatregoers the manipulation of glass, light and outside space has let air into a building that I have always found welcoming, but which can look forbidding. There are more loos, better access and better orientation. Pinch points have been eased at bars and cloakrooms. Most impressively, this has all been done with great sensitivity towards Lasdun’s beautiful, difficult, intractable structure, and the theatre has stayed open throughout.

Next up is the makeover of the Lyttelton, and the construction of an outdoor staircase to the Terrace Café, a bit of the building I’ve never managed to find in three decades of National visits. “People never find the Terrace Café,” sighs Josefowski.

So roll on, NT Future.

WHO IS LLOYD DORFMAN?

Lloyd Dorfman cites the Tates and the Courtaulds when the long relationship between the arts and philanthropy comes up in conversation. After fortunes built on sugar-refining and textiles paid to set up two of London’s best-known cultural institutions, it is foreign exchange that is financing this latest makeover.

Dorfman, 62, was briefly an investment banker before opening the first Travelex outlet selling holiday money in Bloomsbury in 1976. He has since masterminded its growth into a global player, with 1,500 stores in 28 countries. After the firm was sold to Middle Eastern investors in a £1 billion deal in May, Dorfman will keep a small stake and stay on as president.

He has dabbled in other business ventures, such as The Office Group, his take on the serviced office market, and Doddle, an online shopping collection and returns service at railway stations.

But he remains close to the arts, with Travelex sponsoring cheap tickets at the National since Dorfman got talking more than a decade ago to a board director over dinner, who introduced him to Sir Nicholas Hytner.

He is also on the board of trustees at the Roundhouse and with his son Charles was an early investor in Everyman Cinemas. Incidentally, Dorfman Junior financed the development stage of Oscar-winning The King’s Speech.